The Christians of the Holy Land are accustomed to practicing the faith between supervening patterns, a product of the perennial political instability in the Middle East, which the Israeli authorities manage in the Old City of Jerusalem based on regulations and restrictions. Catholics, Orthodox, Protestants, Armenians, and adherents of other Christian faiths are coping in centuries-old churches and shrines in a city that is holy, for various reasons, to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
The tension of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict materializes not infrequently on the esplanade of the Jerusalem mosques, with clashes between Muslim faithful and Israeli police, as happened last week, in an escalation that continued with attacks and violence of various origins in Gaza and the West Bank.
But for Christians there is now something else. The rise to power in December 2022 of the new government of Prime Minister Beniamin Netanyahu with associates from the religious extreme right has made life worse for Christian communities in the Holy Land. This climate emboldens Jewish extremists, with harassment of the clergy and vandalism against religious buildings and symbols since the beginning of this year.
“The frequency of these attacks, the assaults, has become something new; these people feel protected, the cultural and political atmosphere can now justify or tolerate actions against Christians," said the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, Pierbattista Pizzaballa, in an interview at Easter to the Ap agency.
Italian Archbishop Pizzaballa, a 57-year-old Franciscan, is far from a newcomer, so his diagnosis is accurate and worrying. He has lived in the Holy Land since 1990, and was a Franciscan Custos (2004-2016) and then Apostolic Administrator of the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem (2016-2020). In October 2020, Pope Francis named him patriarch of this historic see – it was erected in 1099 – which currently serves 300,000 Catholics in Israel, Palestine, Jordan and Cyprus.
Jerusalem is now home to 15,000 Christians, mostly Palestinians, but in its day there were 27,000, before difficulties since the 1967 Six-Day War prompted many to migrate abroad.
The Inter-church Center in Jerusalem – an office of the World Council of Churches, an association that includes various Christian denominations – has recorded seven serious cases of vandalism against church property between January and mid-March, a sharp increase compared to the six cases registered throughout the year 2022. According to this center, attacks and harassment of priests and religious are not usually reported.
In January, religious Jews damaged thirty graves in a Protestant cemetery on Mount Zion. In February, a Jewish American threw to the ground and struck with a hammer an image of Christ at the Catholic Church of the Flagellation. In March, two Israelis attacked a priest with a metal bar in the Catholic Basilica of Agony, in the Garden of Gethsemane, before being arrested. Armenian monks have found hate graffiti on the walls of their convent. There are police investigations and there have been arrests, but the political climate gives wings to supporters of the religious extreme right.
Until now, the Israeli government has verbalized very few and tenuous condemnations of these attacks, although the Foreign Ministry, more aware of the international reverberations of the impairment of religious freedom in the Holy Land, promises to maintain that commitment. Christians have accumulated two thousand years of presence in fundamental places in the life of Jesus, and they deserve to be able to pray with tranquility and peace, as do Jews and Muslims.
